About one in five young people have a language-based learning disability. The most common of these is dyslexia. Currently, 70 to 85 percent of children who are placed in special education for a learning disability have it. (Surprising, right?)

Get the facts. Check out these seven.

1. Dyslexia affects nearly 10 percent of the population.
2. Dyslexia is not a disease so there is no cure. It’s a learning disability that includes difficulty in the use/processing of linguistic and symbolic codes, alphabetic letters representing speech sounds or number and quantities.
3. Dyslexia does not reflect an overall defect in language, but a localized weakness within the phonologic module of the brain (where sounds of language are put together to form words or break words down into sounds).
4. Because the source of dyslexia lies in the brain, children cannot outgrow it. But they can learn to read well. And dyslexic adults can be successful in many different ventures.
5. Dyslexia commonly runs in families.
6. Dyslexics do not “see” words backwards. The “b-d” letter reversal for example is mainly caused by deficits in interpreting left and right.
7. People with dyslexia have average or above average intelligence.
   • Dyslexics have excellent thinking skills in areas of conceptualization, reason, imagination, and abstraction.

Start an awareness campaign about this issue at your school. GO [1]

Sources:

Dyslexia Center of Utah [2]

PBS [3]

dyslexia.learninginfo.org [4]